The false assertions made by Imran Khan about India in his NYT propaganda column masquerading as opinion article

New Delhi: Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan penned an opinion article for The New York Times which was published on Friday, wherein he made false assertions against India while trying to rake up the nuclear bogey.

"After I was elected prime minister of Pakistan last August, one of my foremost priorities was to work for a lasting and just peace in South Asia. India and Pakistan, despite our difficult history, confront similar challenges of poverty, unemployment and climate change, especially the threat of melting glaciers and scarcity of water for hundreds of millions of our citizens," Khan wrote.

If this were so, Pakistan would not have been progressively reducing allocations for the water sector in its budgets, even under Imran Khan.

"I wanted to normalise relations with India through trade and by settling the Kashmir dispute, the foremost impediment to the normalization of relations between us," he added.

This holds no truth as Pakistan, even under Imran Khan, did not move to give India Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status mandated under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and neither did it allow land transit to Afghanistan.

"On July 26, 2018, in my first televised address to Pakistan after winning the elections, I stated we wanted peace with India and if it took one step forward, we would take two steps. After that, a meeting between our two foreign ministers was arranged on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session in September 2018, but India cancelled the meeting. That September I also wrote my first of three letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling for dialogue and peace," Khan said in the article.

(With inputs from DNA)